Universal registry lets parents request baby gifts from...

1of3Derrick Boone holds a present during a baby shower for him and his wife, Andrea Schwartz Boone in Orinda. The Boones requested gifts on Babylist.Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small / Special to The Chronicle

2of3Andrea Schwartz Boone and her husband, Derrick Boone, open presents during their baby shower in Orinda.Photo: Photos by Brittany Hosea-Small / Special to The Chronicle

3of3Presents for Baby Boone wait to be opened during the baby shower for the Boones, who requested gifts on Babylist.Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small / Special to the Chronicle

Getting ready for her baby shower last weekend, Andrea Schwartz Boone assembled a diverse wish list: a mobile from Etsy, Baby Gap clothes, a piece from Anthropologie, lots of stuff from Amazon. She also asked for used baby clothes and some help with meal delivery.

She put all those requests on Babylist, a universal registry for baby gifts that’s headquartered in Oakland. The service allows parents-to-be to create wish lists from as many different stores as they like, while gift givers just go to one location to browse the registry. It’s not just stuff: Expectant parents can ask for help with services like cloth diapers or a doula or even life insurance; can specify charities for donations; can request hand-me-down clothes and gear; and can ask for hands-on help with errands, babysitting and home-cooked meals.

“It gave me the flexibility to not just get all my gear from one or two retailers, but to fit the look and feel and style I really wanted,” said Schwartz Boone, a nonprofit executive director. “It was really awesome that people could give their hand-me-down baby clothes as a gift, and that it was easy to select different categories; people could scroll through and say, ‘I want to get all the things for bath time or for sleeping.’”

With the recent demise of Toys R Us and its offshoot Babies R Us, many towns no longer have brick-and-mortar baby stores. Babylist is trying to fill that gap, making informational videos about things like how to collapse strollers and use breast pumps.

“They help people make decisions with more confidence since they won’t see items in person at a store,” CEO Natalie Gordon said. The videos are created by 10 real parents nationwide. Babylist coaches them on how to shoot footage and then edits it.

Gordon found the inspiration for Babylist in her own pregnancy. When she registered for gifts, she realized what she really wanted was someone to walk her dog and help paying for a cloth-diaper service — but there wasn’t a seamless way to make those requests. A former Amazon engineer, she wrote a solution herself and launched the company two weeks before the birth of her son Max, now 7 years old. (She also has a 3-year-old son.)

“Being able to ask for gifts that are more meaningful than things from stores is what resonates most with users,” she said.

Some 50,000 people a month register on the site; this year about $200 million worth of gifts will be given from its registries, Gordon said. The average registry has items from 14 retailers.

Despite Babylist’s success, it faces some challenges. Its audience is both hard to reach and continually churning. Most users may engage for just a few weeks, and then return in a couple of years if they have a second baby — which doesn’t appeal to venture capitalists who prefer businesses with multiyear relationships, Gordon said.

Then there’s the question of why it’s not better known. Gordon’s answer: Woman founder, niche (female) audience, Oakland company (not San Francisco or Silicon Valley), and a team that quietly executes and doesn’t talk about themselves.

“If we were selling sneakers to male twentysomethings at a tenth of our scale, we would be all over the tech press,” she said.

Few universal registries have sprung up. New Jersey company MyRegistry.com, which offers registries for babies, weddings and general gifts, is Babylist’s main rival.

Most Silicon Valley startups rely on venture capital, making it harder to see whether or not they have sustainable business models. Babylist had grown for seven years on its own revenues, according to Gordon, with no investments other than $600,000 in seed money when she went through the 500 Startups accelerator in 2013. This year, it closed a $7 million investment from an investor to fuel more growth.

Babylist makes money in several ways: It gets affiliate fees from retailers when it sends customers to their sites; it has partnerships for advertising and brand promotion; and it has an e-commerce business with a warehouse in Sacramento that stocks thousands of baby items.

The e-commerce operation is growing rapidly, as the company mines its treasure trove of data on what expectant parents buy. For instance, it noticed that people were asking for multiple bottle brands in their registries. “It’s tricky, users say, ‘How will I know what bottle my baby will like?’” Gordon said. “So we put together a bottle sampler pack (coming in September) to let people try out the top-rated six bottles.”

The 50-person company has quietly grown to become one of the largest baby registries in the country, according to weeSpring, a social network for juvenile baby and kid product shoppers.

In February, weeSpring surveyed 3,000 users about their baby registries. Amazon was most popular with 64 percent; Target was second at 56 percent. The now-defunct Babies R Us was third at 44 percent. Babylist and Bye Bye Baby (Bed Bath & Beyond’s baby store) tied for the next slot at 28 percent. (Results add to more than 100 percent as many respondents had multiple registries.)

“People didn’t have a way to convey that what they really wanted was the highly utilitarian stuff, it could be cash for medical bills, or help hiring a baby nurse.”

Babylist aims to simplify the overwhelming process of making decisions with sample lists like “Baby on a budget,” “Minimalist baby registry,” “Los Angeles Cool Baby,” “Green baby,” “Posh baby” and “Twin baby.” There’s also a sample adoption registry that draws on products for age 6 months to 18 months.

Babylist works like Pinterest’s “pin it” button. Users add a “bookmarklet” to their browser, and then just click it as they’re browsing any site when they see an item they’d like to add to their registries. There’s also an app.

“It was really easy,” said Heidi Kalscheur of San Francisco. “I hadn’t done a registry since our wedding 10 years ago” when that involved combing a store’s aisles with a bar-code scanner in hand. “The technology has really improved.”

Kalscheur, whose daughter is now a month old, requested items from 16 retailers, both large and small, including some overseas ones with cute stuff, as well as for food delivery and some Etsy items. She appreciated being able to ask for donations for the San Francisco Homeless Prenatal Program.

“It was a nice simplification to aggregate everything at one URL,” she said.

Carolyn Said covers the on-demand economy (new marketplaces such as Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb that let people rent their time, goods and services), the impacts of automation and AI on labor, and the world of autonomous vehicles. Previously she covered the housing market and foreclosure crisis, winning awards for stories that shed light on the human impact of sweeping economic trends. As a business reporter at The Chronicle since 1997, she also has covered the dot-com rise and fall, the California energy crisis, the corporate malfeasance scandals, and the fallout from economic downturns.